Continuing its low-key crusade for greater mainframe openness (or less IBM dominance of that market), Microsoft has invested an undisclosed amount of money in mainframe emulator provider TurboHercules, said the Paris company.

Interesting story, and I can see what they're thinking, but I have my doubts that companies that are big into mainframes are going to sacrifice scalability, resilience and reliability to start running a bunch of virtualized mainframe images on WinTel hardware. Especially when you start talking about companies that are using things like XRC and PPRC across multiple SYSPLEX's.

What do you guys think?

Plus everyone that's tried to challenge IBM in this market over the years has sunk a ton of money into failing. Think Amdahl and Hitachi. I remember back in the 90's the place where I worked had some Hitachi mainframes that were smoking fast. It was before IBM switched to CMOS, but once IBM switched to CMOS they quickly caught up and blew Hitachi out of that market.

some shops that need to do dev work using ibm dev programs, things can get mega lame. we have done that as well as leased gear+rental time. in the end it was cheaper to bring the hw onsite. we did that with the, allowed at the time, intel based emulator flexes and mp3000s (os/2 host controller.. bleeeh). finally went to a z9 (no ifl -- the integrated facility for linux for those that dont know).

if we could legally run some of the dev work under herc vs a z9/10/next gen, that would be even better. ibm is pushing the zpdt to fill the herc/flex/psi gap now.

Interesting story, and I can see what they're thinking, but I have my doubts that companies that are big into mainframes are going to sacrifice scalability, resilience and reliability to start running a bunch of virtualized mainframe images on WinTel hardware. Especially when you start talking about companies that are using things like XRC and PPRC across multiple SYSPLEX's.

What do you guys think?

Plus everyone that's tried to challenge IBM in this market over the years has sunk a ton of money into failing. Think Amdahl and Hitachi. I remember back in the 90's the place where I worked had some Hitachi mainframes that were smoking fast. It was before IBM switched to CMOS, but once IBM switched to CMOS they quickly caught up and blew Hitachi out of that market.

MS

IBM tends to win on the big stuff. When the desktop and LAN side of IT mushroomed in the late nineties our systems manager refered to it all as 'toys'. The importance of the mission critical midrange/mainframe big database transactional environment has been obfuscated in the minds of post nineties techs by the dash to NT and its successors and internet facing services and infrastructure the last 10 years. A lot of people are unaware and miss out of great career opportunities in this space when chasing the invogue certifcation tracks. It's still out there and very important. This is something I encourage people working the food chain from helpdesk/desktop/server/network to be aware of.

Interesting story, and I can see what they're thinking, but I have my doubts that companies that are big into mainframes are going to sacrifice scalability, resilience and reliability to start running a bunch of virtualized mainframe images on WinTel hardware. Especially when you start talking about companies that are using things like XRC and PPRC across multiple SYSPLEX's.

What do you guys think?

Plus everyone that's tried to challenge IBM in this market over the years has sunk a ton of money into failing. Think Amdahl and Hitachi. I remember back in the 90's the place where I worked had some Hitachi mainframes that were smoking fast. It was before IBM switched to CMOS, but once IBM switched to CMOS they quickly caught up and blew Hitachi out of that market.

MS

+1 I was a victim of the great dinosaur matings of the late 80's early 90's and then did some work inside IBM. I would never bet against them on heavy iron ever. Desktop is a different story however when you really need a mainframe, there is no substitute. Microsoft just likes waking the giant every time they think it's sleeping. It is like picking an open sore but hercules disappearing from the redbooks wasn't an accident.

Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of technology?... The Shadow DO